The folly of militarizing space

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

The International Space Station has been manned by 220 people from 17 countries since 2000, including six Canadians on eight missions. It is a shining star in the annals of borderless co-operation and the peaceful pursuit of knowledge. A “space force” conjures up images of The Thunderbirds, the marionette-driven 1960s television series whose (unintentionally) comical if not earnest puppets comprised a force of privately funded do-gooders operating on land, sea and in outer space. The reality would inevitably be somewhat less altruistic and peace-fostering.

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The Gulf War begins

The Persian Gulf War began on Jan. 16-17, 1991, when a coalition of 35 countries under the United Nations came together to push Iraq out of Kuwait.

Iraq invaded on Aug. 2, 1990, claiming Kuwaiti oil rigs were tapping into Iraqi oil fields and that Kuwait was really a part of Iraq.

Canadian warships were dispatched within weeks. The Canadian commander, Captain Duncan (Dusty) Miller, became co-ordinator of multinational naval combat logistics.

United Nations warnings escalated until January, when Iraq ignored an ultimatum to withdraw, and the UN Security Council authorized coalition countries to liberate Kuwait.

More than 4,000 Canadian Armed Forces members served on HMC ships Terra Nova, Athabaskan and Protecteur, and in 1991 and ’92, with Huron and Restigouche; on U.S. hospital ships and with 1 Canadian Field Hospital in the Saudi Arabian desert; at Canadian headquarters in Bahrain; and in communications, logistical and security support roles.

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January 16, 1920

In Paris, the League of Nations Council meets for the first time.

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Christmas at war: A cabin in the Hurtgen Forest

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

The Christmas Truce of 1914, as the London Telegraph described it, was “one of the most remarkable episodes ever to take place in the history of armed conflict.”

Three decades later, however, in a cabin in a forest just across the Belgian border into Germany, a much smaller but just as improbable truce took place, the details of which read like something out of the Brothers Grimm.

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Britain scores the first WW II sea victory

On Ontario farmland safely inland from Second World War bombing, a town sprang up to house 9,000 people working at a munitions factory that produced 40 million shells for the Allied war effort.

The town was named Ajax, after a ship in a little-remembered sea battle off the coast of Uruguay in 1939, the first Allied sea victory of the war.

Great War armistice terms forbade Germany from building classic warships, so instead it produced heavily armed cruisers the British called pocket battleships.

One, the Admiral Graf Spee, attacked merchant shipping in the South Atlantic, but the Royal Navy’s South American Naval Division had trouble finding it.

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December 12, 1942

An arsonist burns down the Knights of Columbus Hostel in St. John’s;
99 die and 109 are injured. German sabotage is suspected.

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